1. Field of the Invention
The invention is related to information technology and, more particularly, to the use of computer generated notes to improve comprehension and utilization of digitized information.
2. Description of Related Art
Note taking is a basic function of human knowledge acquisition from printed or digitized information sources, familiar to every student, professional, or worker who must select words or phrases of interest from a page or a document. Like the manual process of note taking, computer-facilitated or computer-automated implementations of note taking—including the current invention—all produce value to a user by distillation and/or reduction of the original text of a document into a form more readily managed by a user. The user may perform or seek the reduction and/or distillation of a page or document for the purposes of review and study—or for the purpose of correlating the resulting notes together to produce facts, assertions and conclusions. While notes generated by a human note taker may sometimes be phrases, sentences or paragraphs captured or paraphrased specifically to be quoted elsewhere, manual note taking for the purpose of knowledge acquisition typically aims to capture from a page or document some fragments which convey meaning—the fragments having a significance subjectively determined by a user. Alternatively, the user may seek only a more or less minimal description of what the document or page “is about”. A number of software program products have been developed over time to assist and facilitate the note taking function.
Manual note taking for the purpose of creating and publishing study guides is familiar to every student. In the United States, Cliffs Notes (a product of Wiley Publishing, Inc.) are fixtures of secondary school homework regimes.
Document summarization is related to note taking in that the summarization function attempts to distill the contents of a page or document into a paraphrased form which is ideally of the minimum word length while including the maximum of the page or document's relevant content. Academic and commercial attention to page and document summarization has increased over recent years, especially as part of the effort to improve internet search. Text summarization is difficult, computationally expensive, and requires extremely sophisticated algorithms operating upon extensive supporting semantic, lexical and database infrastructure. Because of these factors, true text summarization is not yet considered practical. “Extractor” (a product of DBI Technologies, Inc. of Canada) illustrates the current limitations of the technology.
Many so-called note taking software products currently available are used as a simple means to capture, store, and organize the text fragment notes generated by the user while reviewing documents, web pages, or other material—either digitized or printed. An example is MagicNotes (a product of Rose City Software, Inc.). Other products capture some or all of digitized source page or document, but require the user to edit out any unwanted material. An example is Zoot (a product of Zoot Software, Inc.). In this group of software products that capture, store and organize user generated or user edited notes, the most sophisticated is Questia, (a product of Questia Media America, Inc.). Questia is an online research and library service with an extensive user interface that presents each page of a user selected digitized reference (such as a digitized encyclopedia) to the user. The user can then highlight and capture as a note any text fragment, phrase, paragraph or larger text fragment and store that fragment in an online project folder, preserving the location from which the fragment was copied. Questia then supports composition of research papers by allowing the easy pasting of the captured text fragments into a document, and then automatically generating and placing correctly formed bibliographic references.
The present invention automatically generates notes from a page or document—or from any other digitized information source. None of the currently available products is able to do so. Further, as described more hereinafter, the novel features and uses of the present invention optimize the utility of the generated notes.